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| Formation | May 20, 1935; 90 years ago (1935-05-20) |
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| Purpose | Regulatory body of thePersian language. |
| Headquarters | Tehran,Iran |
| Membership | Around 300 persons |
President | Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel |
| Website | https://apll.ir/ |
TheAcademy of Persian Language and Literature (APLL) (Persian:فرهنگستان زبان و ادب فارسی,Farhangestân-e Zabân-o Adab-e Fârsi) is theregulatory body for thePersian language, headquartered inTehran,Iran. Formerly known as theAcademy of Iran (فرهنگستان ایران,Farhangestân-e Iran), it was founded on 20 May 1935, by the initiative ofReza Shah, the firstshah of thePahlavi dynasty. The academy acts as the official authority on the language, and contributes to linguistic research on Persian and otherlanguages of Iran.[citation needed]
The first official efforts to protect the Persian language from foreign words and to standardise its spelling ofPersian orthography were made in 1871, during the reign ofNaser al-Din Shah Qajar.[citation needed] After Naser al-Din Shah,Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar ordered the establishment of the first Persian association in 1903.[1] This association officially declared that it used Persian roots as the only acceptable source for coining words. The ultimate goal was to prevent books from being printed with the wrong usage of words. According to the executive guarantee of this association, the government was responsible for wrongfully-printed books. Words coined by this association, such asrāh-āhan (راهآهن) for "railway", were printed inSoltani Newspaper (روزنامه سلطانی); but the association was eventually closed due to inattention.[citation needed]
A scientific association was founded in 1911, resulting in a dictionary calledWords of Scientific Association (لغت انجمن علمی), which was completed in the future and renamedKatouzian Dictionary (فرهنگ کاتوزیان).[2]
The first academy for the Persian language was founded on 20 May 1935, under the nameAcademy of Iran. It was established by the initiative ofReza Shah, and mainly byAli-Asghar Hekmat andMohammad Ali Foroughi, all names in the nationalist movement of the time.[citation needed]
Ferdowsi was a motivation behind Reza Shah's decision to remove foreign loanwords from Persian and replacing them with Persian equivalents. In 1934, Reza Shah ordered the reconstruction ofFerdowsi's tomb and set up a country-wide ceremony in honour of a thousand years ofPersian literature since the time of Ferdowsi, titledFerdowsi millennial celebration, inviting notable Iranian and foreign scholars.[citation needed]
The members of the academy included a number of notable literary figures and highly celebrated scholars upon its foundation,[3] includingAbbas Eqbal Ashtiani,Mohammad-Taqi Bahar,Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda,Mohammad Ali Foroughi,Badiozzaman Forouzanfar, Homayun Forouzanfar, Qasem Ghani, Abdolazim Gharib,Allame Mohammad Qazvini,Mohammad Hejazi,Ali-Asghar Hekmat,Mahmoud Hessabi,Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh,Ahmad Matin-Daftari,Saeed Nafisi,Ebrahim Pourdavoud,Isa Sedigh,Zabihollah Safa,Ali Akbar Siassi, andRashid Yasemi.[citation needed]
Some foreign scholars were also involved, such asArthur Christensen (fromDenmark),Mohammed Hussein Heikal (fromEgypt), Abduqodir Maniyozov (fromTajikistan), Henry Masset (fromFrance), Raf'at Pasha (from Egypt),Jan Rypka (fromCzechoslovakia), Dodikhudo Saymiddinov (from Tajikistan), andMuhammadjon Shakuri (from Tajikistan) andSyed Waheed Ashraf (fromIndia).[citation needed]
The academy was a key institution in the struggle to re-build Iran as a nation-state after the end of theQajar era. During the 1930s and 1940s, the academy led massive campaigns to replace loanwords used during the Qajar era.
The academy strives to protect the integrity of the Persian language. It heads the academic efforts for linguistic research on the Persian language and its sister Iranian languages. It has also created an official orthography of Persian.[citation needed]
The attention of the academy has also been towards the persistent infiltration of Persian, like many other languages, with foreign words, as a result of the globalisation process. The academy constantly campaigns for the use of Persian equivalents of new loanwords. If no equivalents exist, it has the task of linguistically deriving such words from existing Persian roots, and promoting the adoption of these new coinages in the daily lives. The Iranian law requires those equivalents to be used in the official media, governmental affairs, and product management of all companies.[citation needed]
The Encyclopedia of Persian Language and Literature in South Asia (India,Pakistan andBangladesh) was established in 1993 in order to compile the Encyclopedia of Persian Language and Literature in South Asia.[citation needed]
The academy members are selected from masters ofPersian literature andlinguistics. After the 1979Iranian Revolution,Hassan Habibi was appointed as the academy's president, and he remained in that position until his death in 2013. The current president isGholam-Ali Haddad-Adel.[citation needed]
The following is a list of both living and deceased permanent members of the academy since the 1979 Revolution.[4]
On 19 November 2005, the Academy of the Persian Language and Literature delivered a pronouncement on the name of the Persian language, rejecting any use of the wordFarsi (instead of EnglishPersian, GermanPersisch, Spanishpersa, Frenchpersan, etc.) in foreign languages.[citation needed]
The announcement reads:
Supporting this announcement, gradually other institutions and literary figures separately took similar actions throughout the world.[5][6][7][8]
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